Ed Roth was a man of many talents: Painter, pinstriper, airbrush artist, fabricator. And there was one more, maybe as important as the others. Today we’d call it marketing; in earlier days it would be deemed self-promotion. No matter the term, Roth understood that an artist working in obscurity is likely a starving artist. To be successful meant getting the word out about your skills.

In the early ’50s, after mustering out of the Air Force, Roth bought a 1948 Ford, painted it red, lettered it with the name of his business and phone number, and adorned the roof over the back window with a papier mache head and hands, sort of a bizarre take on the old “Kilroy was Here” cartoon.

But as he told Tony Thacker in the book Hot Rods by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, that head “drew too many complaints,” so in 1957 he bought a brand new 1956 Ford F-100 pickup. Roth repainted the light green truck white with bright red flames, installed a tonneau cover with a monstrous airbrush job on it, lettered it for his business (“Any car $4 an up,” read the tailgate), and then used it as his rolling business card.

From Ed to O.Z.

Roth apparently didn’t own the truck for long. Oliver Bradshaw (who goes by O.Z.) spotted it on a car dealer’s lot in Bell Gardens, California—not far from where Roth had set up shop in Southgate—and bought it, flames and all, in late 1957. “It had probably short of 1,600 miles on it when I bought it,” O.Z. says. He had married his high school sweetheart, Delores, in 1955, was serving in the Army, and was looking for transportation. With Roth’s eye-popping F-truck, he got that, and more.

Including some unwanted attention. O.Z. parked the truck on the street by his house in Bell Gardens, and not long after he bought it someone stole the airbrushed tonneau. “It was a canvas or naughahyde cover painted with an engine block with a hideous head and some hypodermic needles sticking out of it,” O.Z. recalls. “Somebody liked it and stole it. By the time I met Ed Roth that cover was long gone.”

The two met when O.Z. took the truck to Roth’s shop to have his own name lettered on it. Instead, Ed painted the words Rinky Dink on the truck, as he told O.Z. the truck had “a rinky dink style of paint on it.”

Internet stories about this truck claim that Roth put a Packard engine in it, but that’s not the case, says O.Z. When he bought it, it had the stock Ford Y-block V8. But on a trip north over the Ridge Route to a friend’s wedding in Fresno, the engine’s rear seal “went out, and it was losing oil. I wanted to change engines before I went back to L.A.”

In a garage in Salinas he found an engine out of a 1956 Studebaker Golden Hawk. “They couldn’t seem to sell it because it was a heavy motor,” O.Z. recalls, “but they could sell my Ford engine rather quickly. So I put the Packard in my pickup.”

O.Z. drove the truck for a number of years in Roth’s flamed paint before making some changes. “It was 1966 or 1967, I’m not sure,” he admits. He sanded off Roth’s paint, removed the hood emblems, filled the tailgate, then repainted the truck with a custom batch of white primer mixed with cobalt blue to make powder blue. The truck’s grille survives with its Roth paint job because O.Z. chose to remove it, with plans to replace it with a tube grille.

“Later on I sanded that blue paint down and painted it forest green the way it is now,” O.Z. says. Careful examination of the truck’s nooks and crannies reveals all of those different colors, right down to the factory green.

O.Z. and Delores moved to Paden, Oklahoma, in 1968 and took the truck with them, though “we didn’t drive it much when we got here,” largely because of “stupidity on my part,” he says. To prep the truck for winter storage, “I took off the radiator without draining the water out of the block. The water froze and cracked the block.”

And so the Ford sat in a barn, “retired from the highway,” as O.Z. puts it, for decades. Keeping it company was a 1931 Pierce Arrow and a 1951 Kaiser Manhattan.

Just Had to Have Them

Nearly 50 years after parking the Ford, O.Z. decided it was time to sell some of his cars. “The man who delivers my propane saw them and just had to have them,” he says, “so I let them go.”

As it turns out, that propane truck driver’s route also included St. Cloud Classics, a specialty car dealer in Chandler, Oklahoma. He told Larry Braswell, St. Cloud’s owner, about a ’31 Pierce Arrow and a ’56 F-100 for sale in Paden. Braswell went to check them out, and while looking the truck over, O.Z. told him it had once been featured in Car Craft magazine. “But he didn’t tell me the truck was owned by Ed Roth until after I bought it,” says Braswell. “That’s when he brought out the magazine. He wasn’t aware that Roth was as big a deal as he is. All he knew was that it was in Car Craft in 1957.”

Braswell transported the Ford and the Pierce Arrow back to his store (the Kaiser is still with O.Z.) and debated what to do with the historic pickup. “We’re on Route 66, and we talked about restoring it to promote the business,” he tells us. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Galpin would do a better job of restoring it. And it really needs to be seen.”

You don’t have to be a Southern Californian to be familiar with the Galpin name. Starting with a Ford store in 1946, Galpin Motors has grown to encompass a network of car dealerships in the San Fernando Valley. It’s also home to Galpin Auto Sports (GAS), which builds and restores significant hot rods, customs, and muscle cars (the Iron Orchid coupe and Grasshopper tribute are among Galpin’s creations) and displays many of them in a museum adjacent to the Ford dealership.

Included in that museum is quite a collection of Ed Roth’s custom vehicles and memorabilia (see sidebar). Larry was well aware of the collection, so he contacted Beau Boeckmann, GAS’ president, and offered to sell the truck to him. “I could have made more money sending it overseas, like to Japan or Australia. But I wanted it to stay here.”

Yet Boeckmann turned him down, thinking he wanted too much money for the truck. “So I decided to put it on eBay one time,” says Braswell. “If it didn’t sell, then we’d restore it ourselves.”

Among the folks who spotted the truck’s online auction was Michael Lightbourn. His passion is ferreting out rare and significant cars considered lost to most of the world. It was he who discovered the remains of Roth’s Orbitron in Juarez and eventually sold it to Boeckmann (see “The Orbitron,” Mar. ’09). Like Braswell, Lightbourn considered buying the truck and restoring it himself. But he reached the same conclusion Braswell had: The historic pickup truly belonged with the rest of the Roth collection at GAS.

“When I sold the Orbitron to Beau, I knew it was going to the right home,” Lightbourn says. “It would be the same with this truck.” So he called Boeckmann, talked to him and Dave Shuten, who does much of the resto work on these cars for GAS, and eventually Boeckmann told Lightbourn, “Get it done.” Lightbourn contacted Braswell, closed the deal, and they met in Socorro, New Mexico, for the handoff. Shuten then picked up the truck from Lightbourn in El Paso.

We photographed the pickup in the GAS museum, where it was parked next to the beautifully restored Orbitron and other Roth-abilia. That was literally the last day it would be as O.Z. owned it, as Shuten and his crew planned an immediate start to return it to its white and flamed glory for a debut at the Grand National Roadster Show. Tony Lombardi, who does much of the mechanical work for Shuten and GAS, will build a correct Y-block for the truck, likely with some period speed parts. “I never knew Roth to leave an engine alone,” Shuten tells us, “but I need to dig further to find out what this engine had on it.”

The Rodder’s Journal guys will pick up the story at that point, but we’re happy to have brought it to you in its as-found condition. There’s a lot of history in this old truck, and none of it is rinky dink as far as we’re concerned.

During its 60-year lifespan this F-100 has been light green (courtesy of Ford), white with red flames (thanks to Ed Roth), powder blue, and then dark green (at the hands of its second owner, O.Z. Bradshaw). Depending on where you look, you can spot traces of every one of those paint jobs on the sheetmetal.Fred Beindorff photographed Ed Roth with his F-100 for Rod & Custom magazine in April 1957. The truck also appeared in the Nov. ’57 issue of Car Craft. Dave Shuten and his crew at Galpin Auto Sports plan to return the truck to this state, right down to the Olds Fiesta hubcaps.Here’s how the pickup came out of O.Z.’s barn on its way to the St. Cloud Classics dealership. Note O.Z.’s Pierce Arrow being towed behind the rollback.(Pic: Larry Braswell)Roth pretends to lay a line on the truck’s grille for Beindorff’s camera.

When the truck surfaced on the Internet, many were skeptical of its provenance, thinking that someone had come across the Roth-painted grille and just hung it on some old pickup.

The grille is not the only tip-off to the truck’s history. The pinstriping Roth laid on the truck’s taillight lenses remains today.

Inside are more remnants of Roth’s work. In 1957 he painted the dashboard with an almost psychedelic pattern of shapes and colors. Several of the original knobs, still wearing their crazy colors, are still on the truck.The truck’s original seat upholstery is remarkably intact. Reproducing Roth’s wild dashboard art is going to be a real challenge for GAS’s Dave Shuten. He was hoping to find traces of it under the green paint, but Bradshaw removed it all.When Roth owned the pickup it had its original 272-inch Y-block, but O.Z. replaced the motor with this Packard engine out of a ’56 Studebaker Hawk. Though it was a bit heavy for the Stude, the 275hp engine made the truck one of the faster runners in Bell Gardens, says O.Z.Yes, those motor mounts are bumper brackets!

The Galpin Roth Collection

Beau Boeckmann has been collecting Roth vehicles and memorabilia for years, and when you see the pickup parked in this group it’s easy to understand why Larry Braswell and Michael Lightbourn both felt it belonged here. Next to it is the Orbitron, which Lightbourn located in Juarez, Mexico, and was featured on our Mar. ’09 cover after Shuten and company completed their meticulous restoration.With all due respect to Ivo and Grabowski, the Bob Johnston/Ed Roth Tweedy Pie is arguably the best-looking T-bucket ever. At GAS it’s parked next to the way-out Mysterion.After Roth finished making the body for the Outlaw he threw the molds away. Robert Williams snagged them from the dumpster, and this body was pulled from those molds. It will be displayed with the restored truck at the GNRS.Roth’s original Mysterion is long gone, but Shuten built this slavishly-exact replica and unveiled it at the 2005 Detroit Autorama. Behind it is Roth’s Honda Civic, painted to serve the same promotional purpose the F-100 did all those years ago.In the early ’60s both Roth and George Barris built what were essentially hovercraft, styled to appeal to the country’s fascination with the burgeoning space race. The Rotar (for Roth Air Car) got its lift via two Triumph motorcycle engines leaned on their sides and turning propellers. The tailfin was inspired by Roth’s 1959 Cadillac.

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